MORGANTOWN -
The season's final rankings came out Tuesday and the
Mountaineers landed in the Top 20 nationally.
A 17th place finish in the AP Poll and 18th
in the USA Today Coaches Poll put a ribbon the 2011 campaign following an
Orange Bowl blowout.
WVU's opponent in that game, Clemson, fell to No. 22 in both
polls after being ranked 15 and 14 following the regular season.
Despite getting beaten badly each time it faced Clemson,
Virginia Tech was voted ahead of the Mountaineers in the Coaches Poll, but four
below (21) in the AP. Apparently losing to Michigan in overtime of the Sugar
Bowl carries more weight than utter destruction of the Tigers in the Orange for
some of the country's coaches.
West Virginia is, of course, the highest ranked team from
the Big East, but Cincinnati found its way into the Top 25 as well.
Five Big 12 teams finished ahead of the Mountaineers,
including conference champions Oklahoma State, which settled for third place
behind national champion Alabama and runner-up LSU.
That's the conference WVU believes it will be heading into
for the 2012 season and clearly the competition out west will be far ahead of
what the Big East presented.
An Orange Bowl performance with 70 points on the board
served as the Mountaineers' message to whatever conference it plays in next
year that they are to be taken seriously, and with a head coach who has
succeeded in the Big 12 as a coordinator, there should be an added sense of
optimism.
Dana Holgorsen received the Football Writers Association of
America award for First-Year Coach of the Year on Monday, recognizing the job
he did in his first stint as head coach. With a 10-3 finish and a BCS bowl
championship trophy in his display case, Holgorsen certainly deserves the
honor, but if you know anything about him, you know it means very little at
this time.
His focus is on closing out the 2012 recruiting class strong
and getting the pieces in place that his team needs if it will have any chance
to carry its momentum into the coming season. Then it will turn to winter
workouts and spring camp and at no point will he slow down and think, "My, what
a swell first season I had."
Offensively, there's absolutely no reason his Mountaineers
cannot continue to build on what they did in Miami. All the key components are
returning, including the all-important quarterback, Geno Smith.
And if 401 yards and seven total touchdowns were any
indication, he's finally getting a grasp of this system.
"That's how this offense is," says quarterback coach Jake
Spavital. "If you remember at the beginning of the year we said it's all about
the system and Geno learned about checks and staying in the pocket, not taking
sacks and not turning the ball over and it seemed like we had those struggles
throughout the entire year and then we got to where Coach Holgorsen would send
the play in, Geno would make the check and we wouldn't turn the ball over and
we ended up scoring a lot of points."
Spavital is excited for the offseason, knowing that his job
won't be to teach an entire system like he did a year ago, but rather to tweet
some techniques and review some of the finer details.
For the second year in a row, the bigger question marks for
the Mountaineers will likely be defensively, as the roster again loses big
numbers from that side of the ball.
Five starters from the Orange Bowl are lost to graduation,
including two-thirds of the defensive line, perhaps the team's most important
cog in Najee Goode and its top corner, Keith Tandy.
Through injury and poor play, reserves have gotten
experience, but not to the extent that they will be accustomed to the number of
snaps that await them in 2012.
Then there is the question of which coaches and coordinator
will lead them.
A Top 20 team is poised to leave the Big East and move to
the Big 12 with the rookie coach of the year and a record-setting bowl
performance. It will not lack confidence, or the hunger to prove itself for an
entire regular season, not just one night in January.
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